Now yes, I do give him his props for being part of the "Greatest Generation", where his got his ass shot down into the Pacific Ocean. That shit takes brass knockers and every single fighting man and fighting woman who did their part in Old Double-yuh Double-yuh Two has earned my respect for what they did.

That includes Pappy.

HOWEVER… The man did spend a significant portion of his life serving the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex AND the Secret Intelligence Police State, BOTH OF WHICH have caused more bloodshed on this planet than any sane person can conceive of.

He was part of the lie that was the Reagan Revolution, which set the stage for America's long term decline over the past thirty years. He hired Lee Atwater to poison this country's political process with racism in order to get elected to his one term. He bungled a minor border conflict between Iraq and Kuwait into a major war, by bastardizing the diplomatic process and setting stage for further American involvement.

I should state, for the record, that his wholly unnecessary and tragically violent invasion of Panama was the single most important incident which radicalized me against the Republicans. He should burn in hell for doing that alone.

But he wasn't done… He also sired a new generation of assholes, one of which matriculated into the White House with outright theft and deceit, fucking us up even further.

So, I'm stating for the record that I will brook NO BULLSHIT about how nice a statesman he was, how he should have had a second term and all that other crap, simply because he's going to be worm food. He was one of the worst people ever to be part of modern American politics.

He should be held up as a lesson about WHAT NOT TO DO, instead of being lionized. But they'll do it anyway, both Democrats and Republicans… AND they should know better.

Fewer than 4,000 adults in the southern state receive welfare, even as poverty is soaring. How Georgia declared war on its poorest citizens—leaving them to fight for themselves.

When the economy crashed in 2008, millions of Americans lost their jobs. Applications for food stamps soared. So did attendance at emergency food providers—soup kitchens and food pantries—that help the estimated 50 million people, working and non-working, who can’t afford enough groceries to get through the month.

Unlike in past economic downturns, though, the welfare rolls barely budged. Where 15 years ago 68 percent of poor Americans received cash via Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (as welfare was officially renamed in 1996), today only 27 percent of Americans with incomes low enough to qualify for cash benefits receive them. As the New York Times’ Jason DeParle discussed in a front-page article earlier this year, the resulting welfare gap has left at least 4 million families with neither jobs nor cash aid.

The size of the welfare gap, however, varies widely from state to state. In states like California and Maine, which have focused on getting their poor citizens into jobs programs, about two-thirds of those eligible still receive welfare. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Georgia, which over the past decade has set itself up as the poster child for the ongoing war on welfare. Even as unemployment has soared to 9 percent and 300,000 Georgia families now live below the poverty line—50 percent higher than in 2000, for a poverty rate that now ranks sixth in the nation—the number receiving cash benefits has all but evaporated: Only a little over 19,000 families receiving TANF remain, all but 3,400 of which were cases involving children only. That’s less than 7 percent, making Georgia one of the toughest places in the nation to get welfare assistance.